Smaller trucks, such as light pickup and sport trucks, have an open bed with solid sides and a hinged solid metal tailgate. The tailgate is lowered for loading and unloading operations, and is fixed in a vertical position for running operations. An objective of this tailgate is to prevent persons and objects from falling off the rear of the truck bed. When the truck is running these tailgates exert a substantial parasitic aerodynamic drag. Their substantial weight and their parasitic drag combine to reduce the attainable speed of the vehicle, especially of smaller trucks with less powerful engines, and decrease the attainable mileage per gallon of fuel.
The above disadvantages have long been widely recognized. In response, a market has developed in nets to replace the solid barriers. These can stop many or most articles and persons from falling out, and parasitic drag is greatly reduced or minimized. There are, however, shortcomings in the known nets which have led to higher prices, poor appearance, noisiness, and accelerated wear. Even so, a considerable demand exists for even these products because of the advantages they provide, especially their lesser weight and their lesser parasitic drag.
The existing tailgate nets suffer from several widely recognized problems. For example, they are not self-supporting in any way and rely on tension created by elastic inlays or the tensioning of individual horizontal webbing straps to try to create a flat tailgate shape. Without exception, these methods of tensioning produce very uneven results, such as bagging and sagging, as well as considerable high frequency flutter and flapping (with resulting noise) when the vehicle is in motion. The dynamic actions of these unbalanced systems further contribute to widely experienced tearing and rapid wear. The multiple individual attach points which are the characteristic feature of such nets are the only structural interconnection between strands that extend in one direction and strands that extend in another direction. Therefore unless every strand is equally tensioned, there will necessarily be an out-of-plane sag or distortion. Such even-ness of tensioning is most unlikely to be attained, and the consequence is a sloppy appearance, and the dynamic problems just described. In addition, these fabric nets have no hardpoints which can allow the attachment of an integral anti-theft device. The tailgate net has an industry-wide and consumer-wide reputation for quick and easy theft. All of these problems have been consistent and recognized from the inception of the product concept. It is an object of this invention to overcome them.